It booted into the installer fine. And I played around a little with the shell (fdisk and disklabel, since I wanted to use a softraid encrypted disk).
After messing around for a while I figured out what to do.
Making some mistakes here and there I figured it would be best to just start the installation over... the first mistake.

This being the middle of the night, and me a little more than tired i just typed 'reboot' into the shell, and just expected the installer to come up again in a minute.. but it wasn't to be.
Now I can't get further than boot> prompt on the install media.
It outputs:

Code:

booting hd0a:/bsd: and a line full of numbers..

..and then nothing.

I've rebuilt the install media 2 times, doing fsck's all the way through so that's not the issue.
I can't understand what I can have messed up besides the default linux install on the HDD, but what's on the drive shouldn't matter for the installer to boot?

If you've made it this far then my obvious question to you is, what now? Pull the disk from the netbook and do an install on it in an other computer? Pour gasoline on it and let the fucker burn? Punch myself?

A far simpler solution would be to install OpenBSD to a USB flash drive as described in Section 4 of the FAQ. Copy the bsd.rd kernel to the root partition + copy the necessary filesets to an accessible location. Where ever you want to install OpenBSD, boot the bsd.rd kernel instead of the default bsd kernel, & install as directed. You will be getting the same result as a custom constructed USB flash drive with far less effort.

Quote:

After messing around for a while I figured out what to do.
Making some mistakes here and there I figured it would be best to just start the installation over... the first mistake.

Without information as what the steps taken were, there is little anyone can do to resurrect your installation.

Quote:

I wanted to use a softraid encrypted disk...

Guessing, I question what the partition configuration was used, & if you encrypted the boot partition. If so, this would account for not being able to reboot; the boot partition cannot be encrypted.

Quote:

Now I can't get further than boot> prompt on the install media.
It outputs:

Code:

booting hd0a:/bsd: and a line full of numbers..

..and then nothing.

...which might be explained by my earlier hypothesis.

Quote:

I can't understand what I can have messed up besides the default linux install on the HDD, but what's on the drive shouldn't matter for the installer to boot?

I can only hope that anything critical, be in on your OpenBSD or Linux installation, was backed up.

Quote:

If you've made it this far then my obvious question to you is, what now?

You can do a default install of OpenBSD to the USB flash drive, & boot OpenBSD from flash. At this point, use disklabel(8) to look at the encrypted hard drive to discern if the partitioning is recognized. If it is, then you may be able to mount unencrypted partitions in order to retrieve important data. If nothing is important, simply reinstall.

A far simpler solution would be to install OpenBSD to a USB flash drive as described in Section 4 of the FAQ. Copy the bsd.rd kernel to the root partition + copy the necessary filesets to an accessible location. Where ever you want to install OpenBSD, boot the bsd.rd kernel instead of the default bsd kernel, & install as directed. You will be getting the same result as a custom constructed USB flash drive with far less effort.

Thank you for your reply, I'll certainly look at whats described in the FAQ and see if I can get things to work that way.

Quote:

Without information as what the steps taken were, there is little anyone can do to resurrect your installation.

I'm sorry if my rambling was unclear, I never finished the install (although the installer might have thought so since I issued the 'REBOOT' command - I don't know if that is different from the command one would use under normal operation of the o/s?).
The problem is that the install media just refuses to boot again.

I guess this might be more of an hardware issue than an OBSD one?

Quote:

I can only hope that anything critical, be in on your OpenBSD or Linux installation, was backed up.

No, nothing important. It was just a default single user, no x, linpus linux install. The comp has never been used.

I'm sorry if my rambling was unclear, I never finished the install (although the installer might have thought so since I issued the 'REBOOT' command...

There is a reboot(8) command, & information presented to the user as the end of installation explicitly asks for this command to be executed. Given your comments made here, I am less certain in intuiting what you have done & knowing whether this can be resurrected.

My suggestion to you is to ignore disk encryption for now as you familiarize yourself with the installation procedure. Again, Section 4 of the FAQ is the best guide for learning & explanation of installing OpenBSD 5.2.

And to help you minimize the frustration & anxiety associated with being new to the OpenBSD environment, taking the time to familiarize yourself with the entirety of the FAQ now is time you will save on countless questions & issues.

Quote:

I guess this might be more of an hardware issue than an OBSD one?

My suspicions are that the procedure used to encrypt the disk was mangled. Again, I recommend following the information presented in the FAQ until you have more experience.

There is a reboot(8) command, & information presented to the user as the end of installation explicitly asks for this command to be executed. Given your comments made here, I am less certain in intuiting what you have done & knowing whether this can be resurrected.

My suggestion to you is to ignore disk encryption for now as you familiarize yourself with the installation procedure. Again, Section 4 of the FAQ is the best guide for learning & explanation of installing OpenBSD 5.2.

And to help you minimize the frustration & anxiety associated with being new to the OpenBSD environment, taking the time to familiarize yourself with the entirety of the FAQ now is time you will save on countless questions & issues.

My suspicions are that the procedure used to encrypt the disk was mangled. Again, I recommend following the information presented in the FAQ until you have more experience.

I really don't care about the aborted install, I didn't even put the install sets on the disk before I decided it would be best to start over. There is nothing there to rescue, that's not the problem.

My only problem now is that I somehow f*cked something up so badly that I can't even get into an installer. Both the OBSD- and Slackware installer hangs before it even gets going, using both said flash-stick and a usb-hdd that I dug out of a closet...

Oh, brother! Never shall I again doubt the wisdom that is the official OpenBSD documentation. Of course it worked brilliantly! FAQ über allez!

If I'm allowed to speculate on what went wrong I think that part of the problem was that I at first tried to install a snapshot (I wanted access to the patches in the bootloader that lets u run the system from encrypted root, and I was hoping that support for my arethos wi-fi might show up in current...).
Said snap installer wouldn't boot on my main system after I burnt it to disk so maybe there is something wrong with it. That doesn't explain why I got it to boot the first time, though....

Never shall I again doubt the wisdom that is the official OpenBSD documentation. Of course it worked brilliantly! FAQ über allez!

I'm glad that it has all worked out.

Quote:

Said snap installer wouldn't boot on my main system after I burnt it to disk...

There has been some discussion on the OpenBSD mailing lists within the last week stating that there have been issues with the i386 snapshots. If I am recalling correctly, these have been resolved this week. Occasionally, there are sporadic issues which arise with snapshot install52.iso images, but usually these are resolved within a day or so. I don't know the date of the snapshot which you, kiimoa, used, but this is just to let you know that your suspicions may have in fact been substantiated.

In any event, it's good to hear that you have resolved what roadblocks were at play, & now you have a recent snapshot of OpenBSD running.